Families await supreme court verdict on income rules for spouse visas

The fate of tens of thousands of separated British families in which one parent is not entitled to live in the UK because they have failed to meet a minimum income threshold of £18,600 will be decided by the supreme court on Wednesday.

The ruling is to be a key test of the family migration rules introduced by Theresa May when she was home secretary in 2012, which have led to more than 15,000 British children growing up as “Skype kids”.

The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI), which is a party to the case, has said British families were being “ripped apart” by the minimum income family visa requirement for British nationals and permanently settled residents to sponsor a non-European Economic Area (EEA) spouse or partner to join them in the UK.

The JCWI says it was estimated in 2015 that 41% of the British working population, and 55% of British women, earned less than the £18,600 threshold. The requirement rises to £22,400 if there is also one child born outside Europe in the family. The past and future income of the non-EEA spouse or partner does not count towards the threshold.

The JCWI says the policy has already meant two years of heartbreak for Debra, a British woman, and her family. Debra lives in Croydon and has three children – two older children by her previous partner, and a two-year-old daughter by her partner, a qualified Nigerian engineer. The family were separated for more than two years because of the threshold until her partner was recently granted three years’ leave to remain in Britain.

The ruling will be issued a year on from a three-day hearing in which seven supreme court justices, including the deputy president, Lady Hale, heard claims that the “irrational and absurd” minimum income requirement was forcing British families to make a choice of exile or separation.

It will cover several linked cases testing the legality of the family visa rules. Two of them, Abdul Majid and Shabana Javed, involve British nationals married to Pakistanis; a third, known as MM, is a Lebanese refugee. A nephew of MM, known as AF, is also an appellant, as well as SS, a refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

At an earlier hearing the high court ruled the minimum income requirement was “disproportionate and unlawful” and suggested a less intrusive policy option would be to reduce the threshold to the level of the then national minimum wage of £13,500 and allow savings up to £16,000 to supplement the income. However, this ruling was overturned on appeal.

In the court of appeal, Lord Justice Maurice Kay ruled the policy was not “discriminatory, manifestly unjust, made in bad faith”, nor was it in breach of article 8 of the European convention on human rights that guarantees a right to family life. Kay also said the Immigration Act 1971 did not grant a “constitutional right” for British citizens to live in the UK with a non-EEA spouse who had not been granted the right to live in Britain in their own right.

The children’s commissioner for England, Anne Longfield, has criticised the threshold for particularly penalising British citizens who have lived and worked abroad and formed long-term relationships there. She said it was leaving British children to see one of their parents only via Skype.

Saira Grant, the JCWI chief executive, said: “Tens of thousands of British people have been told by the government that they are too poor to have their partner, and in many cases the parent of their children, spend their lives together with them in the UK.

“Families are an easy target in the government’s relentless efforts to lower immigration – they do not have the loud voice of business or industry to plead their case. British citizens are faced with separation from their chosen partner/child or effective exile from their own country.”

Grand added: “Children are growing up in one-parent families despite having two parents and are suffering high levels of stress which is impacting on their emotional and mental wellbeing, their attainment in school and ultimately is significantly detrimental to their developmental trajectory. The suffering inflicted on innocent, mainly British children who have the misfortune to have one parent from a country outside the EU shows that for this government no price is too high if it lowers immigration.”

Source: The Guardian